Abstract

The value of using literature in the language classroom has attracted a renewed interest
and attention in the ELT community in the last few decades. Major justifications for using
literature with language learners include valuable authentic and motivating material, language
and cultural enrichment, as well as personal growth and involvement. However, in Taiwanese
higher education, literature is often kept off the majority of university English courses and
reserved only for advanced literary courses for English majors. Non-English majors are seldom
provided with opportunities to learn the target language through literary texts because literature
is often considered too difficult or impractical for them. To help these EFL students tap the
power and potential of literature in English language learning, this study brings together
literature and cooperative pedagogy to design a literature-focused cooperative learning (LFCL)
project, in which students work in cooperative groups, inside or outside the classroom, to
complete a variety of cooperative language learning tasks appropriate to each stage of the
reading of a literary work of fiction. This project was applied to my ten-month, two-semester
actual teaching of three groups of non-English majors to explore the effects of such integration
holistically in terms of student experiences and perceptions, motivation, learning processes and
outcomes.